Category Archives: East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:
Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi – members of the East African Community (EAC). Burundi and Rwanda are sometimes considered part of Central Africa
Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia (which includes Somaliland – collectively known as the Horn of Africa.
Mozambique and Madagascar – often considered part of Southern Africa. Madagascar has close cultural ties to Southeast Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – often included in Southern Africa, and formerly of the Central African Federation
Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles – small island nations in the Indian Ocean
Réunion and Mayotte – French overseas territories also in the Indian Ocean.
East Africa is often used to specifically refer to the area now comprising the countries of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
KBR Wins Tanzania LNG Contract
KBR announced that it was awarded a contract by Statoil Tanzania AS to perform pre-front end engineering and design (pre-FEED) studies for a prospective liquefied natural gas facility in Tanzania, East Africa.
The pre-FEED study is designed to help Statoil further assess the viability of developing an LNG facility to export natural gas from this East African region. The project is expected to be completed during 2013.
“We are excited to be selected by Statoil for this important project,” said Mitch Dauzat, president, Gas Monetization. “KBR looks forward to working together with Statoil to define their LNG concept for Tanzania.”
KBR has been working with Statoil for more than 30 years and has an outstanding record for successful project execution, predominantly for Statoil’s Gas Processing plants.
Wood Mackenzie: East Africa’s Yet-to-Find Reserves Hold 95 tcf of Gas
Wood Mackenzie estimates that 100 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas has been discovered in Mozambique and Tanzania to date, ranking the Rovuma Basin as one of the most prolific conventional gas plays in the world.
However, there are significant technical and commercial challenges to be overcome in order to bring the gas to market by the end of this decade. These include: addressing issues around infrastructure, government capacity, financing and reaching a positive outcome to unitisation negotiations in Mozambique.
Recent discoveries and high profile M&A activity in Mozambique and Tanzania are attracting attention and Martin Kelly, Wood Mackenzie’s Head of Sub-Sahara Upstream Research, says the interest is justified: “100 tcf of gas has been discovered to date in East Africa and we estimate yet-to-find reserves could be as much as 80 tcf in Mozambique and 15 tcf in Tanzania. There is clearly plenty of gas to supply the likely commercialisation route of LNG – theoretically enough to support up to 16 LNG trains.
“The Rovuma basin is the most prolific in the region, and one of the hottest conventional gas plays in the world, with 85 tcf discovered so far. Globally in 2011, it yielded the third most hydrocarbons, and we expect it to top the list in 2012 if the first half of the year is anything to go by,” Kelly continues.
In neighbouring Tanzania, the targets are the northern extension of the Rovuma Basin and the Mafia Basin. Kelly says: “Tanzania has enjoyed considerable exploration success as well, but hasn’t discovered the same scale of reserves. The average discovery size is much smaller at around 2 tcf, compared to Mozambique which is over 7 tcf. Discoveries in Tanzania are also more spread out, so developing them will be more expensive than those in Mozambique because additional infrastructure will be required.”
One of the most immediate challenges for Mozambique, is the unitisation discussions which Wood Mackenzie understands have already begun. Kelly explains; “Of the 85 tcf of gas discovered to date in Mozambique, around half of it is thought to be one enormous field which is in communication across the block. Under Mozambican law, a unitisation agreement between the operating parties will be required.”
Although there is a risk that unitisation discussions could delay Final Investment Decision (FID) – the crucial last step before commercial development – and therefore LNG production, there are other discoveries which are wholly contained in Area 1 and Area 4 and therefore gas could come from these first.
Giles Farrer, Senior LNG research analyst for Wood Mackenzie comments: “Many challenges will need to be overcome prior to LNG project sanction. The region’s remoteness and lack of development present serious technical obstacles. There is virtually no existing skilled workforce and both Mozambique and Tanzania will have to build and establish deepwater ports capable of servicing the needs of the petroleum sector. On the commercial side, there is the question of government capacity – whether there is sufficient impetus and capability within the governments and national oil companies to advance the huge legislative, bureaucratic, customs and financial challenges that such a development would bring.
“The major outstanding milestone for Mozambique is the conclusion of a commercial framework agreement, which is in the process of being negotiated. It will determine how the LNG facility or facilities will be structured for the purpose of taxation and whether the Joint Ventures (JVs) will co-operate in the construction of a single, mega LNG facility, or pursue individual developments. One crucial advantage that the Tanzanian projects enjoy is that they have already negotiated commercial terms, prior to the announcement of their projects.”
Farrer continues: “Lastly there is the question of finance, we estimate that a two train greenfield development in the region is going to cost at least US$25 billion, and for some of the players involved financing their share of this sort of development cost will certainly prove challenging and could delay development.”
The joint analysis by Wood Mackenzie’s upstream and LNG research teams stresses that these challenges are not insurmountable. “They have been encountered and overcome in several countries before. The risk is that delays could lengthen development schedules and add to costs,” Farrer says in closing.
Wood Mackenzie: East Africa’s Yet-to-Find Reserves Hold 95 tcf of Gas| Offshore Energy Today.
Why Kenyan Birth Claim Was No ‘Fact Checking Error’
No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work to deep-six it.
“This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me – an agency assistant at the time,” Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC News. “There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”
This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of reasons. Let us start with the obvious. At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant. How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 “error” to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007? To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth. I am confident that there is no such submission.
Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich’s explanation for a New York minute. “As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE,” writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line. “It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?”
The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted, “All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner.” This is standard. In the eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information sent out about me either by agent or publisher. Like most authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.
The most interesting “tell” in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure relates to what was said about Obama’s career in the business world. Obama, the reader learns, “worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.”
In Dreams from My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of racial awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial melodramas in the book. As Obama tells the story, a “consulting house to multinational corporations” hired him and promptly promoted him to the position of “financial writer.”
Here, he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines,” and a guilty one at that. “As far as I could tell,” he adds, “I was the only black man in the company.” He does not boast of his racial uniqueness. Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it “a source of shame.” Indeed, the whole experience troubled him:
I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan Dan Armstrong revealed Obama’s whole account to be a “serious exaggeration.” Obama worked at not a multinational corporation, but a “small company that published newsletters.” He was not the only black person who worked there. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles. He mostly just copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the company’s customers.
Are we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed Obama’s birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed him from a grunt filling three-ring binders into a “financial journalist and editor”?
When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details. There are two good, non-exclusive possibilities. For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself — “a spy behind enemy lines.” For another, Obama’s co-author, Bill Ayers, once again took the framework of Obama’s life and roughed in the details.
In Fugitive Days, Ayers’ 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase “behind enemy lines” almost literally to describe his and his comrades’ quiet infiltration of the opponent’s position. Wife Bernardine Dohrn has said the same in public. When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, Dohrn warned that people fighting “Amerikan imperialism” all over the world “look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.”
The bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting identities his entire adult life. If the agency brochure was a snapshot of the 1991 Obama, Dreams captured him in his 1995 pose: hip, black, progressive, wounded by racial slights but able to overcome them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 21st century, then the extent of his and Ayers’s ambition for him.
“I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s[,]” Bill Ayers would tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years. “And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago.”
Friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard. “He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding office,” she would tell early Obama biographer David Mendell.
No one would have challenged Obama’s biography had he not gone beyond Chicago, but he did. And so where he was born matters, and whether he even wrote his own biography matters, too. As much as I know about Obama, I don’t know or pretend to know the answer — at least to the first of those two questions.
Related articles
- Why Kenyan Birth Claim Was No ‘Fact Checking Error’ (johnmalcolm.me)
- Why Kenyan Birth Claim Was No ‘Fact Checking Error’ (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
- Uh oh: Messy Detaails: A ‘Fact Checking Error’? Dystel & Goderich Ask Writers to Submit Their Own Bios (tarpon.wordpress.com)
- General Theory Explains Obama Book Catalogue, Hawaii Birth Certificate, and Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (txwclp.org)
Kenya: President Obama Undisputed footprint birth cerificate, according to the Mombasa Imam, 01042012
http://www.africanpress.me. Undisputed footprint birth cerificate, according to the Mombasa Imam, 01042012 (click image to enlarge)
President Obama will be forced by circumstances to apologise: Genuine Birth Certificate surfaces – Americans have been led to believe otherwise, revelation to change the political landscape « African Press International (API).
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It Looks Like The Newest Country In The World Is Officially At War
by Adam Taylor
The situation between South Sudan and Sudan over disputed oil fields has been on the verge of blowing up into a full scale war for weeks.
Today AP is reporting that South Sudan’s president has said that Sudan has now declared war on his country.
This could be a big deal, with other African nations and even Sudan’s Chinese allies at risk of getting involved.
Read more: BI
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Apache Hires Drillship for Ops Offshore Kenya
Pancontinental Oil & Gas NL reports that the Kenya L8 licence operator Apache Kenya Limited (Apache) has secured the use of the deepwater drilling ship Deepsea Metro 1 to drill the giant Mbawa Prospect.
Apache is anticipating a spud date within Q3 2012, with the actual date depending on when the drilling rig is finished with its current operations.
The well is expected to take some 45 to 60 days to complete to a planned total depth of 3,250m subsea in water depth of 860m, easily within the range of modern equipment.
Pancontinental has a 15% interest “free-carried” through Mbawa drilling by Tullow Oil plc up to a “cap” of US$ 9 million (as may be reduced by other exploration expenditure). Pancontinental now expects to have contribute more to the well cost due to increased well cost estimates.
Pancontinental estimates that Mbawa has maximum potential to contain 4.9 Billion Barrels of oil in place at the main Tertiary / Cretaceous level with significant additional potential also to be tested by the well at the deeper Upper Jurassic level and shallower Tertiary levels. Only drilling is capable of verifying the oil and gas volumetric potential (if any) of the Mbawa Prospect.
Pancontinental has four projects offshore Kenya covering more than 18,000 square kilometres in licence areas L6, L8, L10A and L10B, with the L8 / Mbawa project being the most advanced and Mbawa being the first prospect to be drilled.
Pancontinental’s CEO Barry Rushworth commented;
“Pancontinental is in the unique position of having sizeable interests in a number of Kenyan and Namibian offshore licences and having substantial leverage to any Mbawa drilling success. We are very pleased that a drilling rig contract has now been signed by our operator Apache for the L8 Mbawa Prospect. We are pursuing what we see as a major oil play rather than a gas play offshore Kenya and we are doing the same offshore Namibia. The economics of oil developments are often far better than those for gas, with potential for much earlier cash flow and much lower development costs compared to LNG, for example. Apache is now leading the L8 venture in an aggressive exploration programme and in our other Kenyan blocks L10A and L10B we also have fast-moving activity led by BG Group”.
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BG Group makes fourth gas discovery in Tanzania
BG Group announced Monday a fourth Tanzanian gas discovery from the Jodari-1 exploration well located in Block 1 offshore southern Tanzania. Preliminary evaluation of the well results indicates gross recoverable resources are in the range of 2.5 to 4.4 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas.
The partnership of BG Group (60 percent and operator) and Ophir Energy (40 percent) have had exploration successes in all four wells so far drilled in Tanzania, with mean total gross recoverable resources currently estimated to be approaching some 7 tcf of gas.
Jodari-1 is located approximately 24 miles (39 kilometers) offshore southern Tanzania and in a water depth of 3,770 feet (1,150 meters). It is part of the current three-to-four well exploration program, which also includes the acquisition of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) of 3D seismic data in Block 1.
The next target for drilling is the Mzia-1 location in Block 1, some 14 miles (23 kilometers) to the north of Jodari-1. The discoveries announced previously are Chaza-1 in Block 1, and the Chewa-1 and Pweza-1 discoveries in Block 4.
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Obama’s Kenyan Birth Certificate Surfaces In Africa
Note: You can magnify this if you use Magnifier tool; found in the Windows Accessories folder under Ease of Use.
Click image to Enlarge
Now it is here and places the president in the African continent. The debate surrounding it will now end after the revelation, and those who have not been telling the truth will have to be made answerable one way or another.
The revelation, however, coming during this election year 2012 is doing no good to the democratic party.
API on Tuesday the 6th March evening received President Obama’s genuine birth certificate. API decided not to hurry in publishing it immediately because we wanted to be sure of the content value.
Click image to enlarge
Now that the scrutiny has been done, the publishing of the Birth certificate that will clear the air once and for all is being done without prejudice. This may force the US president to apologise to the American people for having been kept in the dark on the issue for a long time now on demanding the publishing of the birth certificate by President Obama.
API will scan in here a letter from Coast Provincial Birth Registration Office in the next few hours or days, depending on how quick API is cleared to do so.
The purpose of scanning the official letter is to ensure that what we have received as you see here is fully collaborated officially.
http://www.africanpress.me : Obama registration sir edward of lavender was the colonial registrar in Mombasa in 1961? Check it out and satisfy yourself by weighing the facts individually.
Everyone knows that the documents are very sensitive and are not for misuse by any person to gain upper hand in political games.
It is, however, fair that the whole truth is brought to light and have the whole saga put to rest once and for all.
Many people seem to be of the opinion that there is a plan to hide from them the real thing. The US President says he is born in Hawaii. Many documents being circulated worldwide says otherwise. Therefore, it is very important to be outright and get the real thing on the table without witch hunt or without trying to malign the president’s name, unless the truth is not what he personally has said.
A duly signed official letter and a very special document will be scanned here for all to see – this comes in a few hours or days, depending on how quick API gets the clearance to do so. The two documents will put the issue to rest and clear the air once and for all who wish to know the true facts of this case file that has bothered a section of the American people!
It is only reasonable to continue working on this case in order to reveal the truth of the matter.
Another issue important to consider is why many are so interested in this. If Obama has ruled now for three good years and is now in his fourth year – and already asking for another term that will give him new 4 years in the White House, is there any wrongdoing when he actually has delivered leadership and continues to do so? He has not run down the country, so what is all the farce about where he is born? After all, he has lived in the US all his life.
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Continents of the World
Mb50's "Liquid Mud" Rant 